FILM: Godzilla
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Wantanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn…
DIRECTOR: Gareth Edwards
Giftwrapped in an emotional father-son and family bonding story that hooks you on the sensitivity graph, Godzilla doesn’t give anybody time to be endearing or sarcastic or human in any way. It is a conundrum of a techno-thriller and a fabled nightmare put together.
In the opening credits, director Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla pays homage to the first 1954 released Godzilla film by re-establishing the fact that the monster is a product of the man-made nuclear disaster at Hiroshima.
What follows is: In 1999, in the Philippines, at the site of a mining disaster, Japanese scientist Serizawa (Ken Wantanabe) and his cohort Graham (Sally Hawkins) are among those who are baffled with the discovery of radiation in the gigantic fossils.
Simultaneously, on the Japanese coast of Janjira, American scientist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston), who is working at the local nuclear power plant suspects that the increasingly strong tremors are officially blamed on earthquakes. He argues, “Earthquakes are random. These tremors have a pattern.” But then it is too late as the entire facility is reduced to a wreckage and in this disaster, he loses his wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche).
Fifteen years later, Joe and Sandra’s only child, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has grown up to become a bomb diffusing expert for the US Navy. He is one day summoned to bail his father, who has stayed behind in Japan all these years. When Ford arrives to bring him back home, he realizes that his father has not left his past behind. He has holed himself in the tiny apartment, crammed with would-be evidence of a government cover-up of what really happened at Janjira.
To support his argument, Joe shows him that the quarantined place is another sham. “The radiation in this place ought to be lethal but there is nothing here.
It’s clean.” And with guilt, he admits, “My wife died here, something here killed her.” And at the same breath he warns that something is “going to send us back to the stone-age.”
Soon that something is revealed as MUTO – short for a Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism, which resembles the sleek long-legged Praying Mantis who lives on a diet of radio-active energy.
Once this 300 foot creature makes an appearance, all hell breaks loose and the thrill begins, with not one but two of them to entertain us, with fire in their belly and strong desire to mate.
One moving from Janjira Japan and the other from Philippines, they travel past Honolulu, Las Vegas and all points in between heading towards the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
And to destroy them to “restore balance in nature”, Godzilla too moves in the same direction and their paths merge at San Francisco Bay in California.
Despite the result being obvious and the logical explanation absurd, the emotional quotient between the human characters is engrossing.
The action sequences; when the monsters hop from one skyscraper to the next, crashing buildings and causing mayhem, don’t live up to the mark. It is a bit of a letdown.
Also, the fear element in the humans witnessing the monsters fighting each other seemed too synthetic and difficult to relate to.
Similarly, Ford’s track to eliminate the monster was not only outrageous but also preposterous which is lost in the finale.
And finally, packed with technical brilliance and arresting visuals, the film leaves you yearning for the kaiju, Godzilla. After all he is the protagonist, the trump card, the main attraction of the film. (IANS)
FILM: Children Of War
Cast: Indraneil Sengupta, Raima Sen, Farouque Sheikh, Pavan Malhotra, Tilotama Shome, Victor Bannerjee …
DIRECTOR: Mrityunjay Devvrat
In one of the many mind-numbing images in this exceptionally vivid work on the ravages of war, the back of a truck is jolted open and out tumble a bunch of women one on top of another at a Pakistani prison camp for Bangladeshi women run by a despicable tyrant, who could be the Nazi mass murderer Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.
But no. It’s Pavan Malhotra, brilliantly evil and slimy as the man who believes that if Pakistani soldiers rape and impregnate enough Bangladeshi women, the separatists and freedom fighters would stop dreaming of their own homeland.
This is the irrational, blood-soaked ravaged Pakistan of 1971 when Bangladesh was born out of the most horrific violence perpetrated against humanity.
Very often as I watched debutant director Mrityunjay Devvrat’s stunning film, I was reminded of the great anti-Nazi films, like Alan Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice, Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far, and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds.
I was also reminded of Nandita Das’s Firaaq about Gujarat’s 2002 genocide where a truckload of corpses had tumbled out. The difference is, the women who fall from the truck like trash from a garbage van in Children Of War are alive.
They might as well be dead. As these Bangladeshi women, played by actresses of various ages – from 12 years to 40 years, who seem to live every second of the agony, are raped repeatedly you wonder how low human beings can fall when given unlimited power.
Rape as a tool of oppression has never served a more brutal purpose in any other film except Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen. And you wonder why the man or woman, who sits in the boss’ chair in the corporate organization, is no different from the leery neo-Nazi from the Pakistani concentration camp who supervises the mass rape of Bangladeshi women.
“Children Of War” shows how and why absolute power corrupts absolutely. Revisiting the Bangladesh war of liberation in 1971, it recreates with nerve wracking vividness the horrors of those times when suddenly a whole civilization was threatened with extinction.
The director spares us none of the agonizing details. Why should he? When humanity suffered, first world countries turned their faces away. It’s time to face the music. The unannounced midnight knock and the graphic rape that follows, the brutal slaying of refugees on the run as they are intercepted and shot point blank (in slow motion) on a river bridge as they try to escape, the leery Nazi-like army man urinating onto a prisoner’s face….War never seemed more like a personal and political violation.
This is not a film for the squeamish. But then war was never meant for the civilised. The sheer incivility of a strife where one bully-section of a country decides to teach another section of the people a lesson, is captured in layer after layer of unstrapped brilliance portraying the complete collapse of compassion.
The film is littered with passages of unbearable pain and, yes, agonizing beauty. It is an indelible irony of all visual arts that human hurt makes for great visuals. The lush lyricism that the director supplants to the suffering never takes from the powerful statement on pain and suffering.
Cinematographer Fasahat Khan shoots the chilling nights with prowling predators and ravaged women captured together to emblematise the essential conflict between sexual aggression and vulnerable victims.
There is no manipulation here in the merger of the murky and the magnificent. They have co-existed from time immemorial. In this film, the ugly and the cherishable are so close together you can touch both and come away a changed film viewer. The plot moves across several epic conflicts simultaneou-sly. There is a teenager Rafiq (played with heartrending vulnerability by Riddhi Sen) who loses his entire family and his home and is left with only a sister (Rucha Inamdar) to flee from the brutality of his homeland to the relative safety of India. (IANS)
